The Tower of Bones

by Frank P. Ryan

  Nothing happened.

  Damn! He should have guessed as much. It just wasn’t going to be anything as easy as that.

  He sensed that a hostile force was beginning to invade his body. He could feel it working against him, weakening his will. The muscles of his neck were turning to ice. He could barely move. There was a sound in his ears, a faint sound, but there was something about it that caused him to break out into a sweat. Was it his imagination, or did he hear the thudding sound of his own heartbeat, slowed to maybe half its normal speed, like some clock inside his head that was slowly ticking?

  Try the oraculum!

  He tried again; this time rather than speaking his answer he thought it aloud through the oraculum. One squared was one. The square root of one was still one.

  Nothing.

  He thought he sensed a movement under his feet. A quaver of uncertainty, as if the ground he was standing on was no longer solid. It felt as if his feet were planted on a raft floating in water. Goddam! He tried to look beyond the glowing pentagon within the circle, but beyond its glow there was utter darkness.

  The ticking was getting louder, like a clockwork mechanism that had come alive inside his brain. The slow, distant rapping sounded distinctly ominous.

  He turned his mind back to what little had been given him as a clue. The contraction of the light to a pinpoint in space. The extending of the pinpoint to lines and angles that were, maybe, like the extension of the single focus to the pentagon, drawn not in two dimensions on a floor but in three dimensions within a perfect sphere. Maybe the riddle had nothing to do with the numeral one, but with a three-dimensional pentagon within a sphere?

  He felt himself spinning, as if he had become the point, his entire being moved along the many lines and angles, tracing the three-dimensional pentagon within the sphere. A numinous sense of power was all around him, so close it flooded all of his senses, yet he couldn’t understand it. It was the proximity to the power that was debilitating him. He felt increasingly weak, his head dizzy. He tried to clear his thoughts to think. A perfect pentagon inside a sphere … and I’m at the dead centre of it.

  As in a dream, he recalled his old maths teacher at high school. Miss Pemberton was droning on about those ancient Greeks like Euclid, who had discovered how the relationship of a circle to its radius was always the same. The constant was something those ancient Greeks had called pi. She had worked some tired old analogy, with Granny’s apple pie, cut into slices, about the importance of pi. He hadn’t taken a great deal of notice of Miss Pemberton at the time. He didn’t have a clue what pi really meant – and to tell the truth Miss Pemberton hadn’t seemed much wiser – but he did recall that you had to use pi as the constant when you were figuring the radius that drew a circle. Maybe it was pi that translated a three-dimensional pentagon into a sphere? How the hell would he know!

  But he whispered it anyway.

  ‘The answer is pi.’

  The force inside him began to expand. He sensed, without needing to have it explained, that if it continued to do that it would end with his death.

  He had a vision of an expanding circle. As the circle expanded, a second circle formed at exactly right angles to it, so one expanding circle was within another. Then the inner circle began to rotate within the outer circle, which began to rotate in the opposite direction. And all the time they were expanding – spinning and expanding so very quickly it was becoming a blur.

  He himself was at the very core of the inner circle. He was spinning, rapidly, in three dimensions. He had become a third circle, spinning within the two vaster circles.

  Then, as if in a final moment of lucidity, he thought about his arch-enemy, the Tyrant of the Wastelands. The Tyrant’s symbol resembled a triple infinity. He considered that hated symbol, as he had seen it on the hilt of the Sword of Feimhin, or drawn into Mo’s sketchbook, or the swords and shields of the Tyrant’s legionary soldiers.

  He allowed the symbol to fill his mind: a triple infinity. He tried to find words to describe it, but he didn’t possess the vocabulary. He thought of the symbol for infinity, the two interlocking circles, and then he amazed himself by imagining three interlocking infinities all meeting at their centres, opening out into three-dimensional space. With little or no confidence in his jumbled thoughts, he hurled that image into the void. He felt a jarring dislocation. The mathematical symbols were gone. His body was dissolving, just as it had dissolved on that fateful day on the summit of Slievenamon. He felt that same agony as his physical being was being torn apart. Then, abruptly, he was standing on the infinite white plane of Dromenon.

  For several moments he felt paralysed with shock, his mind numbed. It was as if his will no longer belonged to him.

  He blinked repeatedly, struggling to regain control. Reaching up, he brushed his fingertips against his brow, as if to reassure himself that the oraculum was still there. He found its smooth inverted triangle, but it felt unresponsive – dead! Abruptly the ticking returned, louder than before, like a measured drumbeat invading his senses. The drumbeat must be important. He tried to locate the source of the rhythmical sound, which was accompanied by a distant tinkling, almost a musical accompaniment – and he glimpsed the distant glint of gold. The gold focused to a figure of sorts, so far away he could barely make it out, a figure that appeared to be striding towards him in a slow-motion majesty of movement. The very landscape looked contrived, like something produced by a computer program. Through this surreal landscape the tiny glinting figure was marching, step by step, in a slow advance in his direction.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  The tinkling was coming from the golden figure and the drumbeat was the rhythm of its march. The whole scene, the gleam of gold moving through the immense white plain, was sublime beyond words, yet horribly mechanical at the same time. And now that he could make it out more clearly, the fantastic intricacies of design that made up the golden, glittering figure, it seemed vaguely familiar to him.

  There must be a clue in the familiarity.

  Another riddle; he guessed it had to be. Another trial, as if he were not fed up to the back teeth with riddles.

  Alan studied it more closely now. He was forced to clench his eyes shut, rubbing at their aching shapes, to get them back into a clearer focus. When he opened them again the figure was significantly closer. The tinkling came from the movements of its clockwork. It was an automaton, a fancy robot. Why was it so maddeningly familiar to him?

  He whispered, ‘This is not the portal!’

  A voice, cold as a polar wind, replied: A True Believer creates his own world through the power of his imagination.

  ‘I didn’t create what I’m seeing.’

  Yet is it not a world created of and for the imagination of your kind?

  A nauseating dizziness caused him to clench his eyes shut again. When he reopened them he found himself in front of an elaborately carved desk. Behind the desk a frail old man was bent over his writing. Gazing about him, Alan saw that he was standing in some kind of library, lined with ancient leather-bound books.

  ‘Is this supposed to tell me something?’

  The old man did not look up, but his withered hand reached up, then spun round on its axis, as if dismissively responding to Alan’s question. A new complex of sensations invaded Alan’s mind. He sensed the waves of the sea. The movements of air on the breeze. The patterns of tissues and organs developing within the eggs or wombs that bore them. It was as if he was being allowed a glimpse of some ultimate truth – like the secrets of creation.

  ‘What’s it all supposed to mean?’

  I welcome you with an acknowledgement of what is dominant in your world.

  Startled, Alan gazed down at the bent head of the old man, a figure with a white beard and long, thinning hair. There was also something very familiar about this figure, something he recalled from a textbook at school. Suddenly he recognised who it was – one of the greatest thinkers and artists in history, the elderly figure of Leonardo
da Vinci. Even as he recognised him, the old man raised his head. His eyes were now opened wide, but they were not the rheumy old blue that Alan recalled from the picture in the book, but a malignant all black.

  We meet again, oraculum-bearer!

  Alan realised at once who the figure really was. He had been hoodwinked into a confrontation not with the Fáil but with his arch enemy, the Tyrant of the Wastelands.

  ‘So it was a trap.’

  The face, with its black orbits, beheld him in a contemplative silence. Then the claw-like hand spun once more on its axis and pointed, as if to indicate the golden robot, which had continued its march.

  Communication

  Mo stared overhead at the squealing flocks of seabirds that seemed to be drawn, as if through magnetism, to wheel around the stationary grandeur of the Temple Ship

  ‘Oh, Qwenqwo?’

  ‘Now then – let us face our fears together!’

  They hesitated before the smooth flat expanse of ivory that was the blank face of the great horned head. Mo felt a fall in temperature, with the estuary breeze cutting through her clothes to numb her skin. The sound of the waves lapping against the prow beneath her seemed strangely muted in her ears, as if the imminence of change were blunting all of her senses.

  ‘You must promise me, Qwenqwo, that you’ll leave me here. As soon as you’ve helped me find the dream world.’

  ‘I can make no such promise.’

  ‘I won’t be alone, Qwenqwo,’ she spoke softly. ‘I have a very powerful friend to keep me company.’

  Qwenqwo gazed about the Ship with evident scepticism. ‘I have no intention of abandoning you.’

  ‘Please do it for me, Qwenqwo.’

  ‘If I left you alone and you came to harm, I would never forgive myself. So I shall not leave you where there is the slightest danger. Accept my presence or there will be no entry into the world of dreams.’

  Mo reached out and brushed the gnarled right shoulder of her protector. In that instant she knew what she had always instinctively assumed – that the emotion she felt for this man, who owed her nothing yet would surely die to protect her, was the love she might have felt for a father – perhaps even father and grandfather combined – which had been cruelly withheld from her life. Tears came into her eyes with the depth of that realisation as she gazed about her at the silent titan that was the Ship, which held itself so utterly still in spite of the movements of waves or weather.

  ‘Then please do it now, Qwenqwo. You must use your talisman to help me communicate with a mind that doesn’t think in words.’

  Qwenqwo sighed, settling himself cross-legged before the blank ivory face on the foredeck, inviting Mo to do the same. ‘Put both your hands on the runestone I place here on the deck before you. I will put my hands over yours. Think only of your fears – your concern for Alan and Kate.’

  She did so, closing her eyes. Mo’s hands folded around the oval of jade, her fingers numbed by the cold, yet she held it tightly, feeling the intricate carving that covered every inch of the ancient surface, sensing the power and mystery that brooded there. Her nostrils felt congested, as if she couldn’t easily breathe through them. When she parted her lips her mouth felt unusually dry, and then the briny taste of the sea arrived onto her tongue, a taste that also reminded her of iron – of blood. With a start she opened her eyes again and saw that Qwenqwo had sliced open his right palm, allowing the blood to flow over her hands.

  ‘I don’t have the time to invoke the mysteries in the age-old way, so it must be thus, brutally direct.’

  Mo watched how the blood ran through her fingers and over the deeply patterned surface of the Soul Eye that had once borne her own image in an urgent message to Alan, at the time she was prisoner of the false Mage of Dreams. She shivered as the blood of the true Mage of Dreams empowered the runestone on the ivory deck, uniting his talisman to the Ship through the living bond of his blood.

  She closed her eyes again, waited a minute – two minutes – but nothing happened.

  ‘Why won’t it respond?’

  Qwenqwo patted her hands, as if to encourage her to be patient. She heard the Mage of Dreams chanting, a whispered incantation, hymnal and powerful.

  Still nothing happened.

  Against the continuing murmur of the dwarf mage’s incantations, she brought pictures into her mind. The moment she, Mark, Alan and Kate had first met at Padraig’s sawmill in Clonmel. The summer of sandcastles and adventures that had followed. The growing bond of friendship that had united them then, and forever afterwards. Slievenamon … That feeling of seduction …

  She felt the enchantment again, so powerfully her eyes sprang open. In the great blank face, under the twin horns of the great ray, a circle of golden luminescence shimmered, grew stronger, solidified into being.

  Once more Mo focused her mind on the forebodings she felt in her heart and spirit, for Alan, and through him, also for Kate.

  She stared at the golden circle, observing how shadows invaded its liquid metal shimmer. The shadows swirled and metamorphosed, as if on the verge of becoming the shapes of living things, creatures she might recognise. A single shadow condensed to the figure of a very old man with thinning white hair falling about his shoulders, sitting behind an antique desk, its corners decorated with gargoyles’ heads; the figure and desk floated in mid-air, hovering weightless over a featureless white plain that ran in all directions to infinity. The eyes of the old man were inhuman, all black, as if the absence of light were a tangible property of whatever mind resided there. The figure laughed, an old man’s gentle cackle, but it chilled Mo’s heart. His voice, when he spoke, was gentle. But Mo could only watch in horror as the words emerging from his mouth changed to a stream of insects, blue flies, wasps, locusts – a buzzing conversation exuding from the jaws and the nostrils of what now appeared little more than flaky skin stretched over a skull. Yet still she heard that dreadful voice inside her mind, and she understood every word:

  You struggle to evoke the paltry power of the bauble on your brow. You cannot understand its extinguishing by my power. Even then you seek to find comfort in the fact that it confers a debased immortality, not of the carnal flesh but of the spirit alone. Be warned that the spirit is even more vulnerable than mere flesh. It can be tormented in ways more grievous than any rending of skin and bone. The anguish of the spirit can be extended to eternity …

  Only then did Mo see Alan. He stood on the strange-patterned ground of lines and curves, unmoving, as if he had been turned to stone. He was staring, his eyes fixed far into the distance, to where something awkward and golden was twinkling against the uniform sea of white.

  The horribly buzzing yet incongruously calm voice continued, the words oozing and swarming out of the skull-like face:

  A poor adversary, indeed, have you proved to be, your imagination limited to that of a mechanical world. So have I created a fitting execution. A sage of your world, venerated for his wisdom, imagined a machine. For my amusement, I made real his creation. Behold the instrument of your fate.

  Mo realised that the golden object was moving closer, however slowly, however jerkily and erratically. The sense of dread was overpowering. Mo felt her mouth open to scream but no sound emerged from her throat. The sound, when it did come, came not from her but from the hateful skull as the twinkling object drew nearer.

  Yet still would I save you in both flesh and spirit if only you would go down on your knees and pay homage to me.

  Mo heard Alan’s determined mutter, ‘Never!’

  Perhaps you should take a little more time to consider.

  Mo heard a distracting sound: a loud ticking, as if a thousand clocks had invaded her mind.

  ‘Qwenqwo – that monster is toying with him.’

  Mo felt the hands of the dwarf mage press upon her own as if urging her to preserve her observation yet keep it hidden. With a shrill anxiety she saw that the object approaching was a clockwork figure, a robot, made out of gold. In less than a minu
te of her watching it had quadrupled in size, and it was still growing rapidly.

  You craved to confront the Fáil. But that council of shaven-headed foppery refused to lead you to it. I will so indulge you. I will allow you a glimpse so that you may be allowed to reconsider your position. But first, a warning!

  The ticking grew louder. But throughout all Mo heard a slower, more powerful beat, the implacable footsteps of the robot. By now she could make out every detail of its construction, even at a distance: the glassy unblinking stare of the eyes, the pulleys and wheels, the swivelling mechanical joints, the great feet, rising and falling in the unstoppable mechanical rhythm, and held high above its glittering breastwork, an enormous spiked ball and chain. So ponderous were its footfalls that the white background shuddered with every tread.

  Mo’s heart faltered as the white landscape turned to utter dark. For a moment she thought she was gazing into a vision of death. But then she saw a speck of trembling at the heart of it, like the faintest star in the first pallid sky of night.

  ‘Kate?’ She heard Alan gasp the name. ‘Kate – is it you?’

  Mo wept openly as the speck grew closer. It was hard to believe this scratch in the dark was anything human, yet human it was, curled tight into a ball, the lank hair bedraggled and tangled, the flesh filthy and shrunken, the eyes tightly clenched, lost to a despair as total as the dark that enclosed her.

  She heard Alan’s anguished roar: ‘Kate!’

  Her fate is of the flesh alone. For eternity will your spirit be damned. Even now it is not too late. Yet still would I be merciful. I would save her, as well as you. All I ask is that you yield to me.

  Mo heard Alan’s answering whisper, trembling, though not she sensed with fear but with utter loathing.

  ‘I’d rather we both died.’

  Mo screamed: ‘Temple Ship – if you really are a friend, help him!’

  Suddenly the shimmering gold circle in the Temple Ship was invaded by a different darkness: the inky background of the night sky in which pinpoints of starlight flickered and changed, as if constantly remaking themselves. Mo recognised the matrix of Mark’s crystal, given to him by Granny Dew. She recalled a game she had played with Mark, a shared secret, when Grimstone had locked them in the cellar all night for punishment. In her mind she heard the rhyme: